SAN JOSE — Two Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputies who manhandled the wrong family while investigating a domestic violence report in a Cupertino neighborhood have been found liable by a federal jury of using excessive force.

Three members of the Ibrahim family — a mother and her grown two sons — were awarded a total of $85,000 in damages this month by a U.S. District Court jury in San Jose. They sustained minor scrapes and bruises in the Dec. 14, 2013 incident.

The jury, however, rejected the Muslim family’s claim that the officers’ conduct was motivated by ethnic or religious animus.

The county also must pay the family’s lawyer, Anthony Boskovich, an estimated $180,000 in legal fees and costs.

County Counsel James R. Williams last week defended the decision not to settle the case. He said the deputies who responded to the call had feared someone inside the Ibrahims’ apartment was injured.

“While we are disappointed the jury found any liability, we strongly believe it was important to proceed to trial because it is important that deputies investigate domestic violence cases,” Williams said.

The mix-up occurred after deputies Mark Evangelho and Steven Fernandes were dispatched to the vicinity of Greenwood Court and Miller Avenue in response to a call from a neighbor who heard a loud argument in a nearby apartment building.

Boskovich said the caller accurately described the location, prompting the dispatcher to radio the correct address.

When Fernandes arrived, he could see a man and a woman standing outside the building in question, but they quickly went into their separate apartments.

The deputy knocked on the woman’s door, but she denied she had been arguing with anyone. However, she said she had heard a man yell out of the window across the street to “get back here” and that a woman had shouted back, according to a police report.

Neither deputy tried to speak to the man who had gone into the apartment next door. Instead, they walked across the street and saw Abdelhamead Ibrahim sitting in the passenger seat of his mother’s car listening to his iPod with ear buds.

The young man was waiting for his mother to return with his brother, Abdullah, so they could go to the mosque. They had been on their way when Abdullah shouted out the apartment window for them to wait, prompting the mother to back up and go into the house to urge him to hurry.

The deputies asked Abdelhamead who had been fighting, and when he said he didn’t hear anything, they got the impression he was lying and decided they needed to go into the family’s apartment to see if anyone was hurt, according to court documents.

At the deputies’ request, Abdelhamead led them to the door, but when he got there he said they needed a warrant. Fernandes responded by grabbing him by the arm, pulling him off the step and forcing him to his knees.

Hearing the commotion, Abdullah opened the door from inside the house and the deputies rushed over, shoving open the door and knocking him and his mother, Nora Elsokkary, down. The mother had polio as a child and wears a brace, which broke in the fall.

The jury specifically found that the two deputies detained Abdelhamead without reasonable suspicion, arrested him and his brother Abdullah without probable cause, and used excessive force against both of them. The panel also found the deputies negligent in their dealings with both of them and their mother.

Both brothers were charged with resisting arrest, but the case was dismissed after they agreed in court to perform 25 hours each of community service.

No further investigation was done by the deputies to determine if the couple on the lawn or anyone else in that building was involved in a domestic dispute, Boskovich said.

Tracey Kaplan is a reporter for the Bay Area News Group based at The Mercury News. She covers courts and has been in love with reporting for the past 30 years, including eight at the Los Angeles Times where she was part of a group that won a breaking news Pulitzer for coverage of the 1994 Northridge quake. Recently, she and two fellow reporters won first place for enterprise reporting from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. Talking to people -- including activists, public defenders, prosecutors, academics and inmates -- about the strengths and troubling weaknesses of the criminal justice system fascinates her, as does swimming laps as often as she can.

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